Good afternoon! Here we are at the last week of October, the last week of the 1st quarter for grades, and the last week of Daylight Savings Time! There will be no school on Friday, 10/30 because it is a professional day for teachers.

Monday, 10/26 is the last day of the quarter. Teachers are now entering grades into Gradebook and you should be able to see the quarter grades the first week of November. As you may recall, the district is moving away from paper copies of the report cards. This semester you will be able to see an "official" report card through the parent portal but you will also receive a paper copy. We'll send that home later in November. You also have the ability to download and print a copy of the report card from your own computer or tablet. Second semester -if the timeline stays the same - you will not receive a paper copy unless you notify us that you need one. We also will work from the survey responses to parent access to the internet at home to generate a list of which families need the paper copy.

If your child was a student at SAA last year, you should receive by mail a copy of the student scores on the FSA for English (reading) and math. You will not see a score of 1 to 5 this year. Rather, you will see a percentile indicating how your child compares to all other students at the same grade level throughout Florida. For example if you see a 74 on the column, your child scored better than 74% of the Florida students at the same grade level on that particular test in spring, 2015. Students not enrolled at SAA last year should receive a copy of the scores directly from the last school they attended.

This Thursday about 30 of the middle schoolers will be heading to Georgia for the fall trip. The kindergarten through fifth graders will have their Halloween parade and activities that day as well. Middle schoolers will not be wearing costumes to school but will have some special activities along with their regular classes. The middle schoolers will have a fall dance on the evening of November 6. Please check with the homeroom teacher or teacher website for more information.

A note about school lunches...Students order their lunches in the morning and we must call in the amount needed by 9:00. When students arrive late and do not order, we sometimes run out of food. Because we don't want anyone going hungry, we have to send a porter back to McIntosh to get more food. This means a delay for those children. Salads must be ordered the day before so the staff at McIntosh has time to prepare them. If a student orders a salad, he/she must take it the next day. Please talk with your children if they are regular lunch-purchasers so the lunch times will go more smoothly with everyone getting to eat what they want in a timely manner. The extra items require money in the account. If a student is on free or reduced lunch, they are charged for the extras. Thanks!

Congratulations to the Advanced Chorus group. Their audition tape was accepted by Disney World so they will be performing there in December.

If you think of the Advanced Chorus as a constellation of stars, we should also recognize some individual stars in our SAA nebula...Tatum B (horsemanship - national winner), Roxy M (art - Artsonia finalist ) Bridget M (theater - selected for national tour of Annie), Joey W (music - debuted as lead guitar and lead singer at Aces in Bradenton). We have some amazingly talented artists and musicians here as well as some outstanding athletes. Let me know if your "star" should be recognized next month.

Once again, please check the calendar for events and student agenda books and teacher websites for assignments. And please continue to encourage your child to read 20 minutes per night, to share the vocabulary of the week, and to work in the i-Ready program.